Astro’s mouth tasted like metal and smoke. His head throbbed like it had been cracked open and stitched back together wrong. He blinked against a low, flickering light that cast long, stretching shadows across the concrete floor. Everything was wrong. The air was too still. The silence too deep.

When he tried to sit up, something hard stopped him. Cold. Unforgiving.

Steel bars.

His hands shot out, gripping them instinctively. Thick. Welded. He followed them with his eyes—up, across, down. A cage. He was in a cage. Human-sized. Solid. No way out.

Panic crawled up his throat.

Then he saw her.

She was sitting in front of the cage, silent, unmoving. A woman in a black dress, her legs crossed neatly, as if she’d been waiting there a while. Her face was calm—too calm—and her eyes were fixed on him with unsettling focus. She wasn’t startled that he’d woken. She didn’t flinch when his breathing turned sharp. She just… watched.

A slow smile curved her lips.

Astro’s pulse spiked. He scrambled back until his spine hit the rear bars, breathing hard. His mind scrambled for answers, but all it found was static—until flashes of memory broke through.

The bar. After work. A booth in the back. A second drink that tasted off. Her eyes.

His stomach churned.

He stared at her, chest rising and falling like he’d been running. “What the hell is this?” he whispered, more to himself than to her.

She didn’t answer.

She just kept smiling.